5 Reasons to Go Back to Workplaces Immediately or Sooner.

It is time to make real, hard decisions about going back to our workplaces. After waffling on this topic for some time, I have some strong points of view.

Of course, everyone has and deserves a view of whether workplaces should open, how and when, and whether people should go back to work. For people who actually worked outside their homes pre-COVID, it is an intensely personal decision: am I a critical worker, do I still have a job or have to find a new one, what's my age, living and family situation, are my children at school or will they go to school soon and do I have access to care or have to look after them myself, who else is in my house with me, what’s my financial situation, my mental and physical health, my proximity to work, do I take public transportation, what’s my attitude to risk, and - important to recognize based on the discussions I have had with many people - do I think COVID is a hoax, or, we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg, or do I simply not know.

In the absence of perfect knowledge, each person is 100% correct in their assessment - for themselves. We may come to a different conclusion were we in their shoes, but we are simply not in their shoes!

CEOs, Chief People Officers or Boards of companies have a more global, less personal responsibility: to decide the right return-to-work decision for their enterprise, all the while recognizing, knowing and respecting the wildly differing personal and situational perspectives of the many and diverse people on their teams, often in multiple offices or factories or stores and multiple geographies. In this decision, the personal situation and personal assessment of the CEO, CPO or Board Member is interesting, but is only a single data point. Collectively the CEO and others have a primary responsibility is to look after their team, their customers and their shareholders. 

I have this discussion daily across the companies I am involved in, often many times in a day. 

To date I have to admit that, in these discussions, I have let myself and everyone else down:

Firstly, I made a stunningly erroneous assumption that COVID would be tamed reasonably rapidly - that every world leader would have laser-like focus on the global problem, and cooperatively bring the smartest minds, best science and analytics to bear, generating a unified and continuously improving global action plan. What a mistake (by me) and a disaster (by the uncaring, self-serving and incompetent leaders we/they, the people, voted into power in many of the countries dear to my heart and other countries around the world.).

Secondly, I have been passive: Let’s wait and see. Maybe bring back the people who absolutely must come back, but don’t go beyond that. Let’s learn what parts of the virtual workplace are working and discuss what we want in our “workplace of the future” before we do anything. Let’s see what concessions we can get from our landlord up to getting out of leases and re-think workplace configuration completely. Let’s collect more data - kick the can down the road - give ourselves the maximum degrees of freedom. Yet another mistake.

Fortunately, a couple of weeks ago, I got a note from my friend Tim Levene, CEO at Augmentum Fintech, with a headline “Working from Home versus Living at Work”. It yanked me out of my intellectual stupor and forced me to think harder. Read it!

Regardless of whether you agree with Tim - and I have some questions - we have a job to do: Build companies. Attract, motivate, retain, and look after all the great people that make the backbone of our companies. Build organizations with the will and culture to succeed. Serve our customers brilliantly. Do good in the economy. Give our shareholders the returns we promised. 

None of this will be achieved by waffling - and that’s what I and many people are doing. 

So, after re-consideration, I have decided to put a stake in the ground. I am recommending that CEO’s and my fellow board members adopt the following posture.

My Stake in the Ground for Moving Forward:

We know our workplace of the future will not be the same as our workplace of the past. Until we know more what that means, we will operate with 5 principles: 

1. We will move to bring everyone back to the community of the office as soon as is reasonably possible. This is our absolute direction of travel.
2. We will aggressively configure every aspect of our office and travel to and from offices, our customers and our suppliers to provide maximum safety and duty of care of all our people and all visitors to the office.
3. We will actively encourage anyone who can come back to the office to come back to the office as soon as they can and as soon as we are ready to accept them back safely, knowing that some people have virtual-first jobs.
4. We will compassionately recognize that some people may not be ready, willing or able to return immediately, and make accommodations accordingly when the job can be done well virtually, with the hope and intent that over time they can and will return.
5. We will do everything in compliance with local conditions, local health and community guidance and local prudence.

It goes without saying that the best prevailing medical advice should be followed. Today that means: Wear a mask. Keep your social distance. Wash your hands regularly. Avoid large groups in enclosed spaces for long periods of time. Don't assume you know better. The best advice may change. Don't assume you know better never will!

What Changed my Mind?

Other than Tim's note, lots of things have caused this change, but here are my top 5:

1. Our people want and need to know what the future holds.

Ambiguity is fine for some but awful for most, especially when the world feels like it is falling down around you. Too many companies are giving their people layers of uncertainty on top of the layers that already exist - which is simply not helpful. People are tired of hearing “We don’t know whether we will have offices in the future”. “We don’t know when we will make that decision”. “We don’t know how you will be affected by the decision”. “We don’t know whether we want an office near you anymore”. “We don’t know when we will make any of these decisions”. 

This is not good, not right, not motivating, not healthy. 

Let’s put a stake in the ground today. And if we are wrong, lets change our decision at some time in the future when our reason for changing is evident to all - when the future reveals itself to us. 

It is likely that the big reveal of the office of the future will be - guess what - in the future.

2. Culture, community and energy is why we attract and motivate great people. 

In the absence of the wonderful culture, community and energy that our companies offer - and in a virtual and quite frankly, lonely world - (good) people will soon find that they have lost and actively miss the reason for working in a novel, interesting, quirky, mission-driven, dynamic, but frequently risky company. In the absence of the buzz, they might as well go work at frequently boring companies that offer better money and stability. And people are starting to go!

We should never forget why great people work for us. Nor should we ever forget that success is totally determined by these great people. By definition, great people always have other companies begging them to leave us. Six months ago, no one would have traded a great position at a fast growing, dynamic, culture-rich and often revolutionary company for a mere “job” at an established Fortune 500-like company, no matter how tech-forward. The lure of (much) higher base salary and greater certainty and structure could never outweigh the sheer thrill of working dynamically with great people, doing things no one had ever done before, at speeds no one had ever imagined, and achieving outcomes in the marketplace that were that talk of people who really matter.

For a while, pulling together to win in COVID times created a similar buzz. But “been there, done that” is settling in. And without the buzz of the office and community, we are seeing slow and inexorable drift to well paying and secure “jobs”.

We need to stop this and put the thrill and buzz back in people’s lives.

3. More people are suffering than any of us realize or are willing to accept. 

In the early days of COVID-19 we could understand the absolute and obvious stresses on people - small spaces, often shared with too many people for 24/7 living, particularly if some or many of those people were incompatible with them; limited or no privacy to do work and to have video calls; poor internet and virtual connectivity; the wrong hardware - computers, screen, lighting, chairs, desks; children unable to go to school and needing attention; and more. 

Then we could understand the stress of losing a job, or not knowing whether one would retain a job, and if so, for how long. 

But the less obvious problems are almost more insidious and far more personal. People are suffering from loneliness and disaffection; with people losing jobs all around them, including colleagues in the companies they work for, their stress levels soar and their sense of security is severely compromised; people they know, family members and others have contracted COVID, and worse yet, some have died from COVID; even if they are in relatively good financial circumstances, they may be having trouble making ends meet: feeding people including their children at home where they normally have lunch and other food at school or work; watching food and consumable prices going up at the supermarket; providing financial help to family members and friends and community members who have lost jobs or means of support. The stress list is significant. 

And many are handling it all alone.

It is bad for so many of our people. Getting people back to our office and adding normalcy to the economy can and will change this.

4. We need continuous breakthroughs and are not getting them virtually. 

We have seen sustained productivity, effectiveness and efficiency in most people doing many jobs virtually, and leaders and team members have found creative ways to engage virtually. 

But effectiveness and efficiency seem to be slowly decaying over time. The Hawthorne Effect predicts this.

More insidiously, generating big ideas, thinking out of the box, thinking strategically seems really hard in the virtual world. I am blessed to work with companies that have developed well-honed, well-tested and well-executed superpowers to not only find the next big idea in product, process, technology, and people, but bring it to market rapidly and generate the market outcomes they are looking for. These same companies are struggling to create new magic in a virtual world. We have the same people. But part of the superpower came from some combination of old-school hanging out together at and after work, random interactions, serendipitous comments, and insights from people not normally “in the room”. We don't know how to make this happen virtually. We see some magic - but not at the level and intensity we used to see.

As we look forward to our plans for 2021 for a post-COVID world (I hope) bringing people together to rediscover this superpower is more critical than ever. The world will have changed and every company needs to change with it.

5. Decision makers live differently from most people who work for them. 

The people who make the decisions on the investment required to create safe workspace, to bring people back, and to recreate culture, are people who are least affected by COVID. They tend to live in wonderful spacious and luxurious accommodations - frequently with many alternative residences. Their technology, lighting, air conditioning and heating work brilliantly. They have no worries: they have financial, food and medical security; they have alternative employment opportunities and the financial wherewithal to bridge the time it takes to find another great job; they can have food delivered, find people to take their kids and their pets off their hands, have the flexibility to get and take private time. 

More importantly, they - actually we - tend to live in and interact with an echo chamber of people who are in exactly the same position. Going back to a workplace is not critical for us. 

An immediate decision may not be critical for people like us. But it is critical for the 99% who are not. And, at the end of the day, we, our enterprise, our customers and our shareholders rely on the 99% of our people who are not us, and, quite frankly, whose good we should be focused on.

So....

I do not contemplate 100% of our people in the office tomorrow. I do not even expect office opening tomorrow. But I would like to see decisions made tomorrow, to fill a void and establish a defined direction of travel affecting our organizations end-to-end.

Experience suggests that once the decision is made, everything changes: people can be given knowledge, certainty and hope; plans can be made and executed for safe offices; the organization - hopefully it is an outcome-driven organization - can create the outcomes we are looking for; more and more people will start feeling comfortable to return; we will go back to changing the world.

The actual configuration and detail of what needs to be done will vary from company to company and geography to geography. I do not know the solution set and am not naive enough to suggest it is easy. But with a goal clearly set, it becomes far more probable that we will achieve success.

I would suggest we start immediately or sooner!